Drexel "Practicing Preachers"

It’s probably a little bit of an understatement to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I popped “Practicing Preachers” (mp3), emailed to me by a member of the band about a week or so ago, into my iTunes, to be greeted with something that sounded like it was casually recorded during a random studio session thirty years ago. The quality of the recording is (I’m assuming purposefully) crackly and overdriven at best, and I’d say shitty at worst (perhaps mimicking the intro-Photoshop grandeur of the album cover), but as is often the case, the nastiness of the fidelity only adds to the charm of the song as a whole. It’s of a style that’s essentially non-existent in either indie or any other sort of pop music these days—the sort of rollicking, soul-inflected piano and voice number that was really popular in the early 1970s, if only because of the across-the-board amazingness of Carole King’s Tapestry. And of course later on, Rickie Lee Jones would attempt a very similar thing, only with more barroom honky-tonk than slick R&B, to a nearly equal level of success. Drexel might end up being a band of retro-formalists, but they’re not ironic, which is what allows their music to be good. The lyrics to “Preacher” are bound up in the tried and true lyrical tradition of crooked clergy, sort of like that one verse to Bill Withers’ “Harlem” and more songs that I can’t remember offhand, and they’re delivered with a sincerity of purpose and seeming authenticity (and updated cultural references) that couples with the pounded piano to just make the song completely irresistable on every level.

Buy River of Chowder here.